by B. K. Stevens
“The one thing we haven’t tried,” Maureen said, “is a life of crime.”
She was joking, of course. At least, mostly joking. At least, I thought so at the time.
We were sitting, as usual, at a back table in Monty’s, dampening our Friday afternoon sorrows in a pitcher of beer. I say “dampening” because one pitcher of Bud Lite will not drown sorrows such as ours.
“That’s right,” Inez said. She was the newest member of our group, still in her twenties, still in her first year as an English adjunct at Edson University. Dark haired, olive skinned, and lovely, she looked too petite to have ever borne a child, let alone the twin boys who had grown into irrepressible two-year-olds. “You’ve started several businesses over the years, haven’t you? A resume-writing service, an editing service—”
“And a consulting service,” added Julian. Only five years older than Inez, he’d been in the adjunct business much longer, had tried to leave, and had returned in defeat. He was short and trim and kept his blond hair down to crew-cut length. In many ways, he still looked like the soccer player he’d been in college, not like a PhD who had published two articles on Spenser’s sonnets. “I was around for that one. We tried to talk companies into hiring us to give business-writing workshops to their employees. How many takers did we get, Amy? Three?”
“Two,” I said. “Turned out the business world isn’t exactly clamoring for the skills English teachers can offer.”
“The academic world isn’t clamoring for them, either,” Maureen pointed out. “Not when there’s such an inexhaustible supply of us. Twenty-some years ago, I thought that by knocking myself out in the classroom and publishing and serving on committees, I could work my way into a real job. I took me a long time to realize the university would gain precisely nothing by hiring me full time. Why give me a decent salary or benefits or job security when it can save a bundle by keeping me in adjunct limbo forever?”
A fine rhetorical question, I thought, and wished I could use it as an example in English 102. But I didn’t dare. Adjuncts—part-time professors—never complain in public about the way colleges and universities exploit them. Maureen’s right: There is an inexhaustible supply of us, at least in English. Anyone who makes a fuss can easily be replaced. Even as the wife of a dean, I couldn’t risk it.
Maureen definitely couldn’t risk it. Like Julian, Inez, and me, she’d come to Edson as a faculty spouse. All four of us could tell nearly identical stories: A willingness to make a sacrifice for a husband or wife offered a full-time teaching job in this remote college town, a yearning to spend more time with our children, a decision to put our own careers on hold temporarily, to step off the academic fast track and teach part-time for a few years. As we’d all discovered, stepping back on the fast track was the hard part.
At least Julian, Inez, and I still had our spouses, still had someone to provide a full-time income and health insurance. Maureen got divorced twelve years ago, and her attempts to find a real job in another city failed—colleges tend to hire bright young things fresh out of graduate school for full-time positions, not middle-aged women dulled by decades of adjunct service. So she was still here, still patching a living together by teaching part-time at Edson, at the community college, and for an online university she’d have scorned as a diploma mill in her less desperate days. This semester, she was teaching a total of seven classes—all composition, all generating stacks of essays for her to grade. For Maureen, even more than the rest of us, adjunct limbo was a brutal place.
“So, a life of crime,” I said lightly. “Good idea. You’re my mentor, Maureen—you always have been, ever since I moved here, and now you’ve quite possibly identified our only option for ever making real money. What do you suggest? Bank robbery?”
Julian shook his head. “Too risky. And too intimidating—too many memories of getting turned down for loans and getting lectured about bounced checks and watching tellers snicker when they see how low my balance is.”
“We’ll start smaller, then,” Inez said, pouring herself another half glass. “How about knocking over a convenience store?”
“Still too risky,” I said. “Convenience stores have hidden cameras—the cops would listen to a tape of a grammatically correct demand for cash and know the robber had to be an English teacher. Home burglary’s safer.”
“Not safe enough.” Julian counted off the perils on his fingers. “Dogs, homeowners returning early, homeowners with handguns, homeowners with rifles—”
“And this,” Maureen cut in, “is why criminals are richer than English teachers. Criminals know one can’t make money without taking risks. We can’t be so fussy about which crimes we’ll commit. If we’re serious about this, we’ll have to take risks.”
“We’re not serious about this,” I said, “but if you don’t want to rule out risky crimes, I’ll play along. Let’s go all the way. Let’s murder somebody.”
“Not much profit in murder,” Inez said regretfully. “Not unless the murderer is in the victim’s will.” She looked around the table hopefully. “I don’t suppose we have a Jack Carlson in the group, do we?”
Jack Carlson. The mention of his name made us limp with envy. Like us, Jack was an English adjunct; unlike us, he was a retired public-school teacher. Even before the inheritance, he’d had luxuries beyond the reach of most adjuncts, such as a pension and a savings account. Then, last month, he’d driven to campus in a sleek BMW and announced that a second cousin he barely knew had died and left him everything she had.
“We could trick Jack into putting us in his will,” Julian said, not sounding optimistic, “and then murder Jack.”
“No murdering fellow adjuncts,” Maureen said decisively. “Not even Jack. True, he loves hearing himself talk, and especially enjoys trumpeting his political opinions at top volume. But murdering any adjunct is ethically unacceptable.”
“Now you’re being fussy,” I complained. “Well, fine. We won’t murder Jack. But we should target someone on campus. Face it, we don’t know anything about banks or much about convenience stores. But we know the university intimately. Criminals should stick to their areas of expertise.”
“Great,” Julian said dourly. “We can rip off the petty cash box in the mailroom. How much will that get us? Enough for another pitcher of beer?”
His last phrase reached the waitress slouching past our table. She slowed to a halt and looked us over languidly. “You guys want another pitcher?” she asked. The lilting rhythm of her syllables revealed that she didn’t come from any place near this Midwestern town; she’d grown up in the South.
Julian thought it over. “Sure. We need the inspiration. As they say, malt does more than Milton can.”
The waitress stared at him, then shrugged. “Whatever,” she said, and slumped off.
Maureen glared after her. “‘You guys,’” she repeated. “She’s one of my students, and she calls us ‘you guys.’”
“An Edson student?” Inez said. “And she’s old enough to work in a bar?”
“Oh, we get some non-traditional students,” Maureen said. “Not that Danyelle’s very non-traditional. She just turned twenty-one, I think. That’s her name, Danyelle, with a ‘y.’ The spelling alone tells you volumes.”
“Her parents may have saddled her with that spelling,” I said charitably. “Not that I have much to say in defense of Danyelle Travis. I had her in 101, and she sat there like a lump—never said a word, never opened a textbook. She just stared at me slack jawed as I ran the education past her, as if she were daring me to interest her. And she always had her hands under her desk, playing with her cell phone, checking text messages.”
“You had her in 101?” Maureen said incredulously. “And you passed her? She’s half a notch above illiterate.”
“I know that,” I shot back. “And of course I passed her. I pass all my illiterate students, to keep them from giving me bad evaluations and from running to Nina Dixon and saying I abused them. When the time comes, you’ll pass Danyelle too.”
Maureen scowled but couldn’t deny it. “Damned if I give her anything higher than a B-minus,” she muttered.
“Nina Dixon,” Julian said reflectively. “Now, there’s someone on campus with real money. When I worked in the grants office for those two brain-numbing years, I saw salary figures. Did you know she makes more than a full professor? And all she has is a master’s in student development.”
“Plus quickie certificates in developmental education and academic assessment.” I turned to Inez to explain. “Nina started as an academic advisor. Whenever the university decided an area needed beefing up, she ran to some institute, took a six-week program—at the university’s expense—and came back a certified expert on whatever it was.”
“So now she directs the Office of Academic Excellence,” Inez said, frowning. “I know she directs the writing center and supervises us and coordinates workshops for public school teachers. But how did her salary get so high?”
“For one thing,” Julian said, “she gets herself written into every grant proposal the university sends out. Grant-making agencies always want programs assessed, and Nina’s our expert on assessment. So she gets five thousand for devoting ten percent of her time to assessing one program, ten thousand for devoting twenty percent of her time to assessing another—she must have two hundred percent of her time committed to various grant programs by now. She doesn’t do much with any of them, but she always gets her money. Plus there’s her slush fund.”
Danyelle lumbered back with our new pitcher, sloshed a small pool of beer onto the table, and left without looking at us. While Julian mopped up, Maureen poured herself a full glass. She hadn’t spoken since Nina’s name was mentioned, but her mood had darkened noticeably. Once, Maureen made a few thousand extra a year by coordinating the schedules of the adjuncts who tutored at the writing center. When Nina became director, she decided to use student tutors, cutting all the adjuncts out completely.
“Somebody on campus has a slush fund?” Inez said. “Sounds like something out of All the President’s Men. Where does the money come from?”
“From the workshops for public school teachers,” Julian said. “That’s a steady source of income. Teachers have to earn continuing education credits to keep their certification current, and the university can offer one-credit weekend workshops for practically nothing by having adjuncts teach them. You teach some, don’t you, Amy?”
“You bet,” I said. “Writing across the Curriculum, mostly. It’s a way to boost my semester total to eleven credits.” Full-time faculty teach twelve credits per semester, so university regulations ordain that adjuncts can teach no more than eleven—a convenient fiction that makes it possible to pretend that paying us a fraction of a full-time salary is ethical. That means adjuncts can teach just three three-credit courses per semester and have to depend on Nina for the last two credits. Eleven credits at six hundred and fifty dollars a credit—just over seven thousand a semester. Not an extravagant income, but without workshops, it’d be even lower. Maureen knew this all too well. Nina hadn’t let her teach a workshop in six years.
“Anyhow,” Julian told Inez, “when Nina took over the workshops, she worked out a special deal—don’t ask me how. The university provides rooms for the workshops and pays for printing, mailing, everything—right down to water to flush the toilets. But it doesn’t get the tuition money. That goes into the Academic Excellence account. It’s a special account, called a restricted account, and Nina can use it for just about anything she wants. One year, she used it to buy herself a home computer. She said she needed it to work on Academic Excellence programs on weekends. She also used it to attend professional conferences—two in California, one in Florida, one in Hawaii.”
Maureen set down her empty glass. “So that’s what we do. We get Nina to empty her slush fund, snatch the cash, and split it four ways. At the end of the month, when the treasurer checks all the accounts and sees zero dollars in Academic Excellence, Nina gets fired. That’s our crime.”
“‘Good, good,’” Julian said. “‘The justice of it pleases; very good.’”
“Othello, Act IV,” Inez said mechanically, and turned to Maureen. “Look, you are just joking, right? You’d never actually do that?”
“Of course she’s joking,” I said. “It’s just—well, it’s therapy. We’re venting our frustrations by fantasizing about a life of crime, plotting revenge on Nina. But we’d never do it. Among other things, we couldn’t do it. We’d never get Nina to empty her account.”
“We could kidnap her damn Chihuahua,” Julian suggested. “I swear, it’s the only thing on earth she loves. Then we cut letters out of magazines for a ransom note and—”
“We have to play on her weaknesses,” Maureen said abruptly. “On her character flaws. She’s got plenty. For example, she’s ambitious and greedy and unscrupulous. If we could make her think she’d profit by withdrawing the money, she’d do it.”
“And she’s not bright,” Julian added. “God knows, she’s not bright.”
I hesitated before joining in. It’s just therapy, I reminded myself. “Plus she’s a snoop,” I said. “Remember when she smelled smoke on Charlie’s jacket? She searched his desk while he was in class and found a pack of cigarettes. He swore he never smoked on campus, that he just kept the pack there to ward off panic attacks, but she made sure he never taught at Edson again. She’ll do anything to play up to President Swanson.”
“Swanson didn’t like Charlie?” Inez asked.
“I don’t think Swanson ever met Charlie,” Julian said. “But Swanson is a fanatic about health and fitness. That’s why Nina’s become a fanatic about health and fitness. She took up jogging and yoga the day Swanson signed his contract.”
“So that’s why she pressures us to play in those stupid volleyball games.” Inez looked at her watch. “Yikes—I’ll be late picking the twins up from day care.”
“And I’d better collect my kids from soccer practice and music lessons,” I said. “We’ll have to finish plotting Nina’s destruction another time.”
“Sounds good,” Julian said. “But let’s not tell anyone about our therapy session, okay? Not even spouses. If Nina found out, she’d be steamed.”
Maureen stood up suddenly. “We have to take a solemn vow,” she said. “Not one word about any of this, not to anyone. Agreed?”
She wasn’t smiling. I glanced uneasily at Julian and Inez. “Ooh,” I said. “A solemn vow. Should we slit our pinkies or spit over our shoulders?”
“A handshake should do,” Maureen said, and actually held out her hand.
Julian and Inez got the giggles; then Maureen and I joined in, and we all kept laughing as everyone shook hands with everyone else. Then Julian raised a fist and intoned, “Destruction to Nina Dixon,” in a low, awful tone, and we laughed again and left.
At home, I found my husband in the kitchen, debating the wisdom of adding red pepper flakes to the marinara sauce. He asked if we’d had a nice time at Monty’s.
Usually, I tell him everything. But the hand-shaking ritual, silly as it was, held me back. “Just a typical meeting of Adjuncts Anonymous,” I said. “The usual foursome, the usual moping and whining—our weekly self-pity plunge.”
“Sounds like fun.” He turned to face me. “Amy, you don’t have to keep doing this—all those composition classes, all those essays to grade every night, all the slights and insults. At least take a semester off, finish that article on Persuasion, start the new book. We could manage on my salary.”
“We could,” I said, leaning past him to sample the sauce, “if deans made as much as people think they do. I know my pay’s pathetic, Craig, but it covers a few bills each month. Without it, we’d have to stretch to pay those bills. And with three kids to put through college in the next ten years, it’s no time for me to take a semester off.”
“We could manage,” he insisted. “And it worries me, sometimes, to see how bitter you’re getting. I don’t want you turning into another Maureen Fahey.”
“I won’t turn into Maureen Fahey,” I said, “if you don’t turn into Roger Fahey.” Maureen’s husband had left her for a psychology professor—a full-time psychology professor. I think it would have hurt Maureen less if he’d left her for a student.
“Not a chance,” Craig said. “But Maureen wasn’t just a victim. I’ve heard Roger’s side. She pushed him to take this job—she was wild for more time with the kids. But when she started itching to teach full-time again, she turned on him. Every night, it was, ‘I gave up tenure for you, and you dragged me to this God-forsaken town, and now I’m miserable, and what are you going to do about it?’ Roger couldn’t take it.”
“I know,” I said. “Even Maureen admits that, in her more reasonable moments. Well, I won’t turn on you, even though you’ve been so brilliantly successful here that my wretched excuse for a career looks even more wretched by comparison.”
“I have not,” he said, “been brilliantly successful here.”
“Sure you have,” I said. “Swanson took just six months to promote you to dean. More important, he invites you to play in his Thursday afternoon basketball games. At Edson, that’s the surest sign of success.”
“That’s a sure sign,” he said, “that I’m one hell of a guard. Nobody gets past me.”
“True,” I agreed, “but that’s not why he invites you. Anyway, I won’t turn into Maureen.” I started gathering salad ingredients, then paused. “Why this sudden concern?”
He winced and took both my hands. “The curriculum council approved a course proposal from the English department today. For a Jane Austen seminar.”
That hit me hard. I’d written my dissertation on Emma. “Who’s teaching it?”
He let go of my hands. “Phil Hanson,” he said.
“Phil Hanson?” I echoed. “Craig, that’s absurd. He wrote his dissertation on Upton Sinclair. What the hell does he know about Austen?”
Craig gave the sauce a mournful stir. “He says he’ll read up on her this summer. Look, I could take this up with the department chair. I could—”
“Don’t,” I said. I still felt the sting of my last meeting with the chair, six years ago. I’d put on my best suit and gone to her office and explained that, much as I enjoyed teaching composition, I thought I could serve the department more fully by teaching some literature courses as well—Introduction to Prose Fiction, perhaps. She’d looked shocked. Oh no, she’d said. Potential majors take Introduction to Prose Fiction. We can’t have a course for potential majors taught by an adjunct, by a faculty wife.
My degrees, my publications, my years of teaching advanced courses, none of that counted anymore. I was an adjunct and a faculty wife, and that meant I wasn’t fit to teach anything but basic composition.
“Fine.” I smashed a garlic clove. “Having courses taught by the most qualified faculty available isn’t a priority—not at Edson. The only priority is pampering full-time faculty and giving them the most desirable classes. And the smallest ones. How many students will Phil get in that seminar? Six? Seven? Maybe, if you add up all his classes, he’ll have thirty students next fall. And I get sixty students every semester, and they all write essays every other week. And he’s full-time, and I’m part-time? Please.”
“It’s not right,” Craig said, “but it’s not just Edson. Almost every college and university in the country employs an army of adjuncts now, just to make ends meet.”
I knew it was true. Maureen said that at the community college over seventy percent of the classes were taught by adjuncts. And I wondered how parents would feel about writing tuition checks if they realized how often their children were being taught by part-time faculty—some highly qualified, some recruited out of desperation and barely qualified at all, and some, like Maureen, so weighed down by low pay and heavy workloads that they were constantly exhausted, frazzled, and angry.
“Anyway,” Craig said, “at least take a break from composition. You could still bring in some money by doing workshops for Nina Dixon.”
“Ah, yes,” I said, reaching for a tomato. “For my dear friend Nina Dixon.” I smiled a grim, secret smile. Already, I was looking forward to the next therapy session.
It took place sooner than expected, on the following Wednesday. Julian and I both had ten o’clock classes in Beumler Hall, and afterwards we walked to the adjuncts’ office together. It’s a long, dark, narrow room, stuffed with rusty metal desks and dented file cabinets deemed no longer worthy of full-time professors. When we walked in, Nina was standing by Inez’s desk, pawing through some envelopes.
She put them down hastily when she spotted us. “Oh, hi,” she said. “I’m expecting a report from the registrar, but I didn’t get it. I thought maybe Felix put it on Inez’s desk by mistake.”
Felix is a mailroom clerk. Since adjuncts don’t rate the locked mailboxes assigned to full-time faculty, he brings our mail to the office and sets it on our desks. In nine years, I’ve never known him to misdirect a piece of mail.
“Really?” I said icily. “But you didn’t find the report?”
“Nope,” she said. “Maybe the registrar didn’t send it. He said he did, but you know how that goes. ‘The check is in the mail.’”
It wasn’t funny, but Nina laughed. My spine tensed. Few things on the planet horrify me as much as Nina’s laugh. It’s if as some other being has possessed her, making a sound no merely human body could produce. My husband says it reminds him of a scene in Alien, when a space creature bursts out of a man’s chest and screeches.
Finally, it ended and she left the office, and my spine sagged in relief.
“Can you believe that?” Julian said. “Wait till we tell Inez.”
She walked into the office minutes later, chatting with Maureen, and was instantly indignant. Seizing her mail, she held up a manila envelope. “This must be what caught Nina’s attention; it’s from my dissertation director. My God! If you hadn’t walked in, she might’ve taken it to her office and steamed it open.”
“She’s done worse things,” Maureen said, nodding sharply toward the far end of the office. She, Julian, and I retreated to the ancient coffee urn, tactfully busying ourselves with mugs and sweetener. A missive from a dissertation director is too important to set aside: Inez needed some time, and some privacy.
She joined us in a few minutes, sighing. “He wants me to rewrite the chapter. I knew I should’ve developed the comparisons more fully. Thank goodness Nina didn’t see the letter. Not that it’s such a disgrace—rewriting chapters is part of the process—but if she spread it around campus and made it sound bad, she could hurt my prospects here.”
You poor baby, I thought. Haven’t you realized yet? None of us has any prospects here. “That Nina,” I said, to fill the silence. “Always snooping, always gossiping—”
“We could use that,” Julian said suddenly. “Remember what Maureen said about playing on Nina’s character flaws? We could use her snoopiness to bring her down.”
Maureen pounced on it. “How?” she demanded.
He looked taken aback by her urgency. “I remembered a story my grandfather told me. He was in the Navy during World War II, and this guy on his ship was always snooping, looking for dirt on people so he could report them. So my grandfather and his buddies got the camera used to show movies on the ship, attached some gizmos to it, took pictures of it, and labeled them ‘Atomic Camera.’ Then they put the pictures in envelopes, stole a ‘Top Secret’ stamp, stamped the envelopes, and left them in places where this guy was known to snoop. Sure enough, the next day he went to the captain and confessed, ‘Sir, I’ve seen the Atomic Camera.’”
Inez and I laughed; Maureen didn’t crack a smile. “That’s good,” she said. “So we plant false information that will mislead Nina into emptying the Academic Excellence account. If we put the information in places where she has no business looking and stamp it ‘Personal and Confidential,’ we can be sure she’ll find it and read it.”
“Plausible,” I conceded. “But what kind of false information would we plant?”
“Information that fools her into thinking she can make a profit,” Inez said promptly. “She’s greedy, right? So we tempt her with a phony get-rich-quick scheme. We make her think if she invests money from the account in this scheme, she can make a bundle for herself and replace the money before anyone notices it’s missing.”
I shook my head. “No get-rich-quick scheme works that fast.”
“Does Nina know that?” Maureen asked. “She’s not bright; we’re all agreed on that. We just have to devise something that will befuddle and tempt her.”
“We could mail letters to ourselves,” Julian suggested, “from some make-believe investment firm. We could congratulate ourselves on making huge profits and— Oh. That won’t work, will it?”
“Definitely not,” I said. “Nina knows we don’t have money to invest and haven’t made huge profits. We wouldn’t be scrambling to teach composition classes if we had.”
“True.” Julian stirred his coffee gloomily. “Well, I’ll keep working on it.”
He wasn’t the only one. The next day, Inez unveiled an improvement on the plan. “I thought of a way to make the investment firm scheme sound more plausible,” she said.
She, Maureen, and I were in the women’s locker room at the old gym, reluctantly suiting up for a volleyball game. Edson has a new athletic center on the edge of campus but still leaves the old gym open all day. Secretaries power-walk here on their lunch hours, students shoot hoops between classes, and informal staff teams sign the place out for games. The old gym’s central location compensates for its starkness: one big room with a scuffed wooden floor, locker rooms, and that’s all. It has charm, though, and even President Swanson uses the old gym for his weekly basketball games.
Maureen glanced around to make sure we were alone. “What’s your idea?”
“Well,” Inez said, “we have to make Nina think this firm helps people make lots of money quickly. And we just happen to have in our office someone who came into lots of money quickly.” She lowered her voice. “Jack Carlson.”
“That was an inheritance,” I pointed out.
“That’s what Jack says,” Inez said. “But how do we—or Nina—know that’s the truth? This whole long-lost-rich-second-cousin bit sounds fishy anyway. It’s probably true, but it’s almost easier to believe Jack found a way of making huge profits but doesn’t want to spread the wealth too thin by telling other people about it.”
I dug through my gym bag to find my combination lock. “That means bringing Jack in on the plan,” I said.
“He’d never have to know,” Inez said. “We address an envelope to Jack but put a mailing label addressed to one of us—to me, say—over Jack’s address. Felix puts the envelope on my desk, we peel off the label, and voila—a postmarked envelope addressed to Jack. When Jack goes to class, we rip the envelope open and put it on his desk. Then we make ourselves scarce, give Nina time to read the letter, and take letter and envelope away before Jack gets back.”
“That might work,” I admitted. Nina’s office is across the hall from ours, and she drops by often to make sure we’re keeping our office hours. “And if Nina asks Jack about his investment firm, he’ll say he doesn’t know what she’s talking about, and she’ll be sure he’s keeping a valuable secret. But we’d have to put a check in the envelope, to make Nina believe this firm pays off. That means opening a phony bank account.”
“No,” Maureen said. “That would leave a trace. After the money disappears, the university—and the police—will accuse Nina of stealing it, and she’ll break down and tell them everything. We have to make sure the police can’t trace the investment firm to us. We have to leave Nina with absolutely no evidence to support her story.”
Just then, Nina stuck her head into the locker room. She wore hot pink sweats with a matching sweatband that pushed her short, reddish hair up into a thorny peak. “Hurry up,” she ordered. “We shouldn’t keep the Admissions Office team waiting.”
“Admissions,” I said dismally, after Nina left. “Another guaranteed defeat. Admissions counselors are disgustingly enthusiastic. They probably enjoy these games.”
“Maybe we won’t have to endure them much longer,” Maureen said, and patted my shoulder as we headed into the gym.
We held our next therapy session on Friday, when we met at Monty’s. Again, Danyelle was our waitress; again, she expended the minimum possible energy and didn’t condescend to making eye contact. These days, most students don’t bother playing up to professors. Students know that even if we dislike them, we won’t dare give them the grades they actually deserve.
Pushing those thoughts aside, I helped Maureen and Inez fill Julian in on our locker room talk. “You’re hung up on the check?” he said. “It’s better without a check. We put a sentence in the letter; ‘As usual, to avoid tax complications, we’ve enclosed your dividend in cash.’ She’ll assume Jack pocketed the money: He might leave a letter lying on his desk, but not cash.”
“But what investment firm mails out dividends in cash?” I objected. “That makes the whole business seem slightly shady.”
“Slightly shady is good,” Maureen said. “It makes the impossibly big, impossibly quick profits more plausible. Maybe the firm makes huge profits in a hurry because its operations aren’t quite legal. Nina won’t care. She’s unscrupulous, remember? And if this firm conducts all transactions in cash, she won’t be surprised when she’s asked to hand over a stack of bills when she makes her investment.”
“But how do we invite her to invest?” I asked. “We could probably produce reasonably convincing letterhead on a computer. But what address do we put on the letterhead? What telephone number? Nina would want to check this firm out. How?”
“Maybe through a Web site,” Julian suggested. “Those are easy to set up, and to take down. Letterhead with just the firm’s name and a Web address—that fits the slightly shady ambiance we want. If the site’s sort of basic, that’s okay. A slightly shady firm that keeps a low profile wouldn’t put bells and whistles on its Web site.”
I shook my head. “Before she withdraws the cash, Nina will want to talk to someone. If this is supposedly an out-of-town firm, we’ll have to provide an out-of-town phone number and have someone waiting to answer her questions. How?”
“I have a cousin in Vermont,” Inez said. “She could—”
“No accomplices,” Maureen said. “Only stupid criminals take accomplices. Accomplices make mistakes, they panic, and in the end they make a deal with the police and testify against you.”
“Wait a minute,” Inez objected. “You’re talking about my cousin.”
“I’m sure she’s a lovely person,” Maureen said, “but it would leave a loose end. If the police trace the phone number to your cousin, we’re all in trouble.”
“Let’s not get stalled on that,” Julian said. “Maybe we could use a public phone, or steal a phone. Let’s assume we can solve that problem and move on.”
“Fine,” I said. “It’s just therapy, after all. Who cares if there are holes in the plan? So let’s say we find a way to communicate with Nina. Now what?”
“Now we set up a meeting,” Inez said. “We tell her to bring ten thousand dollars in cash—”
“More than that,” Julian said. “She must have over a hundred thou in that account.”
“But we can’t ask for all of it,” Maureen said. “Nina’s greedy; we’re not. I know we said we’d get her to empty the account, but that’s unrealistic. She wouldn’t do it.”
“So we ask for forty thousand, or eighty thousand,” Julian said. “We’ve got to make it so high she can’t take it from her personal account or use her own savings to cover up the improper withdrawal when the money disappears. Then we say an officer from the firm will pass through town on a certain day and is willing to meet with her if—”
“You guys want another pitcher?” Danyelle asked.
We all jolted back in our chairs. “No, thank you,” I managed.
Danyelle slouched away. “My God,” Inez said. “Do you think she heard what we were saying?”
“Danyelle’s never more than vaguely aware of anything in her vicinity,” Maureen said. “Her cell phone’s her only means of making contact with the outside world, and she makes a special point of not listening to teachers. We’re safe.... So, we say this officer will show Nina documents proving she’ll make huge profits in weeks, and we tell her to bring cash to the meeting. Where will it take place?”
“In a restaurant, maybe,” Julian said, considering. “The mythical investment officer could offer to buy her dinner. Investment officers do that—I saw it in a movie. We pick a restaurant next to a dark alley, and when Nina walks down the alley, one of us jumps out from behind a dumpster, knocks her over the head, and grabs—”
“No violence,” I cut in. “I don’t approve of it, and we’re not up to it. I’ve never knocked anyone over the head, Julian. Have you? Has anyone?”
They all looked down at the table, ashamed.
“I thought so,” I said. “So no more talk about knocking people over the head. I refuse even to fantasize about it. It’s too silly. Not to mention the fact that I can’t think of a single restaurant in town with dark alleys and dumpsters so conveniently located.”
“You’re right,” Julian admitted humbly. “I got carried away. Sorry.”
“We could drug her,” Inez said, refusing to give up. “One of us meets her in the restaurant, cleverly disguised—”
“Oh good grief,” I said. “Disguised? How could we possibly—”
“Please,” Inez said. “Grant me this one point. One of us, cleverly disguised, meets Nina in a restaurant, at a table in a dark corner—some restaurants in town do have dark corners, Amy—and he or she orders drinks. Then he or she slips Nina a Mickey Finn.”
“A Mickey Finn?” Maureen said, looking puzzled. “Oh yes, I’ve heard that expression. In a Bogart movie, perhaps—or was it a Seinfeld episode? It’s a drug, isn’t it, to render someone unconscious? Do you know where to get it?”
“I think one generally makes a Mickey Finn,” Inez said uncertainly, “by mixing various ingredients. We’d have to find a recipe. We could Google it.”
“So we do some preliminary research,” Julian said, “and slip Nina a Mickey. When she passes out, we grab her briefcase stuffed with cash—”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Fascinated as I am by this utterly convincing narrative about clever disguises and Mickey Finns, I have to pick up my kids.”
“I should go too.” Maureen stood up. “My son’s driving home from college for the weekend, and he’s requested meatloaf. I’d better get started.”
Together, we walked to the poorly lit hallway where both customers and employees at Monty’s stow their coats. “That was fun,” Maureen said. “I’m glad you challenged the children about their less realistic ideas. It’s a better intellectual exercise if we don’t make things too easy on ourselves.”
“As long as they remember it’s just an intellectual exercise,” I said. “You don’t think they’d actually—”
“Of course not,” Maureen said. “Now you’re being unrealistic.”
Maybe. Still, odd things started happening. On Tuesday, while Inez was asking me for advice on confronting a plagiarist, Nina sidled over and oh-so-casually asked if we knew the name of the second cousin who supposedly left Jack all that money. We said we didn’t; she nodded curtly. “And did Jack ever,” she asked, “mention this cousin to you before he got this so-called inheritance?”
When we said no, Nina nodded again and sidled away. We looked at each other.
“‘Supposedly?’” Inez said. “‘So-called’? Is Nina having doubts about where Jack really got that money? It almost sounds like—”
“Nina’s gossiping,” I said. “She always gossips. It’s nothing.” But on Wednesday, when we had our weekly English adjuncts’ meeting, relations between Nina and Jack seemed frosty. Jack is Nina’s pet because he’s the only adjunct who doesn’t despise her, and she undoubtedly knows it. Usually, she lets him ramble on endlessly. At this meeting, she cut Jack off twice. The second time, he stalked out.
Nina glared after him. “Selfish bastard,” she muttered.
When the four of us met at Monty’s on Friday, I think we all felt uneasy. Nobody alluded to therapy sessions, or Nina, or the advantages of a life of crime. Instead, Maureen asked if we had new ideas about designing rubrics for comparison essays, and we stuck doggedly to that topic for a full hour.
Then Danyelle brought our second pitcher. “Hey, you guys,” she said, “did any of you notice, like, a cell phone laying around anywhere? Because when I got here, I’m pretty sure I put my cell phone in my jacket pocket, but when I went to the coatroom to check my messages, I couldn’t find it. So I thought maybe it, like, fell out of my pocket or something, and landed on the floor or somewhere. So have you guys seen it?”
We exchanged awkward glances. “I’m sorry, Danyelle,” I said. “Would it be expensive to replace?”
She shrugged. “It’s no biggy. I’ve lost phones, like, three or four times, and the company always replaces them. I mean, like, maybe they charge my parents extra or something—I’m not real sure. The thing is, it takes about a week to get a new phone, and that’s a long time to go without messages. So if you see it, let me know.”
After she left, Inez turned to Julian. “You said we could steal a phone.”
“I was joking,” he said. “Anyway, Amy’s the one who said we’d need an out-of-town phone number. And Danyelle’s got a Southern accent; her phone probably has an area code from Georgia or someplace like that. That fits perfectly with Amy’s plan.”
“Amy’s plan?” I demanded. “I don’t have a plan. You two kept coming up with plans; I kept saying they wouldn’t work. Don’t accuse me of—”
“No one’s accusing anyone,” Maureen said. “It was just therapy, and I think we’re all agreed it went far enough. Now, on my rubrics, I stress topic sentences. Do you?”
During the next week, the atmosphere in the office was more brittle than usual, less chatty. On Thursday evening, while I was breading chicken cutlets, Craig came home still sweaty from his weekly basketball game at the old gym.
“What the hell,” he asked, “is wrong with Nina Dixon?”
“Do you want a list?” I asked. “Or do you have something specific in mind?”
He set his gym bag down. “She must be cracking under the strain of not doing much. First, a little after five, she bursts into the gym, resplendent in those hot-pink sweats, and bellows, ‘Here I am!’ as if we were expecting her—and believe me, we weren’t. I wish you’d seen Rick Swanson’s doubletake. But nobody wanted to be rude, so we let her play. About an hour later, we called it quits. So we’re changing in the men’s locker room, and we hear a shriek. Naturally, it’s Nina.”
“She shrieked?” I said. “Was she hurt?”
“No,” he said. “She was robbed. We ran back into the gym, and she was racing around, screaming, ‘Someone stole something from my gym bag! Catch them!’ We fanned out, searched the building, ran off in all directions. Nobody saw anything. So we came back to the gym, and she’s sitting on the floor, moaning, ‘I’ve been robbed!’ Geez! What did she have in that bag, anyway? Diamonds and rubies?”
The olive oil in the pan started to smoke. I slid in the first cutlet. “Had her bag been in a locker? Was it locked?”
“Yeah,” he said. “She swore she’d put her combination lock on her locker and clicked it shut, and said it was still locked when she came back from the game. So Rick said he’d have security check into it; she just had to give the chief a description of what was stolen. Then Nina turned— Wait a minute ... Is ‘white as a sheet’ a cliché?”
I nodded. “I’m afraid so.”
“Nina got pale,” he said. “Then she glanced at her watch, gasped, and ran back into the locker room. Said she had to get dressed for an appointment. It was strange.”
“It sounds strange.” I flipped a cutlet. “Maybe I’ll find out more tomorrow.”
I didn’t find out much: Nina called in sick, and nobody else seemed to have much to say. When our foursome gathered at Monty’s, I had to start things off. “So,” I said, “someone stole something from Nina’s locker yesterday. Did you hear about that?”
Everybody nodded. Everybody had heard.
“Apparently, Nina was frantic,” Maureen ventured. “She must have lost something valuable. Does anyone know what was stolen?”
No one said anything. Then Julian grinned. “Whatever it was, someone got it away from her without knocking her over the head or slipping her a Mickey.”
“I heard,” Inez said, “that she ran an off-campus errand late yesterday afternoon.”
Maureen sipped her beer delicately. “Where do you suppose she went? To the bank? To make a withdrawal?”
“Possibly,” I said. “I heard that when she got back to her office, she found a typed note from Swanson’s secretary on her door, inviting her to join his basketball game. But Cheryl says she never sent such a note; Swanson says he never made such an invitation.”
“They don’t have much reason to lie about that,” Julian observed. “More likely, someone who knows how ambitious Nina is knew she couldn’t resist an invitation to that game. It’s the biggest status symbol on campus. And if that someone had spent time in the women’s locker room with Nina—before a volleyball game, say—she might have glanced over while Nina was unlocking her locker, memorized the combination—”
“Slow down,” Inez said. “It’s not easy to see the numbers someone’s turning on a lock, not unless you stare in an obvious way. And we all use Yale locks, and they all look very similar. It’d be easier to sneak into Nina’s office—she doesn’t lock it when she steps out during the day, and her gym bag’s always next to her desk. If one took Nina’s lock and slipped one’s own lock into her bag, she probably wouldn’t notice the difference. Then one could wait until Nina left the locker room, open up one’s own lock, take whatever one wanted, put Nina’s lock on the locker, skulk away—”
“My, you’ve given this a lot of thought,” Julian commented. “Anyway, the thief got into and out of the women’s locker room. Therefore, the thief had to be a woman.”
Maureen looked at him sourly. “Or a short, slim man, wearing baggy sweats and a jacket with a hood. There’s no reception desk at the old gym, no one guarding the locker room entrances. And on late Thursday afternoons, there are no stray students or staff around because everyone knows Swanson has the gym reserved for his game. A man could slip into and out of the women’s locker room as easily as a woman.”
“Look, let’s be frank,” I said. “Some things that have happened are uncomfortably reminiscent of things we discussed during our therapy sessions. So we’re all feeling a little suspicious of each other; we’re all wondering if one of us carried out the plan the others regarded as a joke. So let’s clear the air. This theft took place between five and six. I’ll admit I don’t have an alibi. I don’t have carpool duties on Thursdays: Other mothers brought my kids home from practice and rehearsals, starting around six. Until then, I was home, alone, grading essays.”
“And I was at the office until seven,” Maureen said, “grading essays. I was alone too. You know how that place empties out late in the afternoon. Inez?”
Inez sighed. “At home, grading essays. Not alone—my kids were there, making it hard to grade three sentences in sequence. But two-year-old witnesses wouldn’t help much in court. If people think I’m such a terrible mother that I’d leave my kids home alone, I’m doomed. What were you doing between five and six, Julian?”
He shrugged. “Grading essays. My wife watches the kids on Thursday afternoons, so I found an empty classroom and sat there all by myself from four until about six, finishing a stack of essays. Great alibi, huh?”
“As good as ours,” I said. “We all isolate ourselves to get our grading done, and that’s hell on alibis. Now, the hard question. Suppose, just for the sake of argument, the story Nina eventually tells bears more resemblances to our crime-as-therapy scenario. Do we tell the police about our therapy sessions and say one of us is probably guilty?”
“Absolutely not,” Maureen said. “In the first place, even if what happened yesterday resembles our plans, it might just be a coincidence—”
“Oh, come on,” Julian said.
“It’s possible,” she insisted. “Or someone could have overheard our plans and decided to carry them out. We can’t know one of us did it.” She looked at all of us, hard. “I certainly didn’t do anything wrong. Would anyone else like to confess?”
We were all silent, possibly because we were all wondering exactly what the definition of “anything wrong” would be in this context. Maureen nodded.
“All right,” she said. “No one confesses. We’ll just wait and see what happens.”
Quite a bit happened. On Monday morning, Nina went to President Swanson’s office. Moments after the closed-door session ended, rumors started darting around campus. Nina had admitted to “an error in judgment,” all the gossips agreed. Some gossips talked about letters she’d found on Jack’s desk, about an investment firm, about an e-mail she sent to a Web site, about a call from a woman with a “deep, dusky” voice and a Southern accent, about an invitation to meet an investment officer at a restaurant at seven thirty Thursday night. Nina admitted to withdrawing funds from the Academic Excellence account—she claimed she’d intended to turn any profits over to the university, but not even the most gullible gossips believed that. Rumors about the amount withdrawn varied wildly, but two clerks in the treasurer’s office said it was twenty-five thousand dollars. That settled that.
There was talk about the theft from the locker and Nina’s panic. After that, Nina went to the restaurant, perhaps planning to withdraw more money and make profits large enough to hide the lost twenty-five thousand, but no investment officer showed up. Puzzled, Nina checked the record of received calls on her cell phone, called the number for the dusky-voiced woman, and was surprised to hear a recording invite her to leave a message for Danyelle Travis. Now deeply confused, Nina raced to a computer but failed to find the investment firm’s site. She went next to Danyelle’s dormitory room, where she learned Danyelle’s cell phone had been missing for almost a week.
All that happened Thursday evening. The gossips could only speculate about what Nina’s weekend had been like, what desperate alternatives she might have considered before deciding to confess. President Swanson was not pleased. He called Danyelle, he called the police, and both Nina and Danyelle spent a good chunk of the morning talking to detectives. At one point, Danyelle burst into tears and had to be comforted by three secretaries.
The four of us listened to all this talk, but we said little. On Tuesday morning, Nina returned to her office and shut the door. On Tuesday afternoon, a fiftyish man in a tan coat came to the adjuncts’ office, introduced himself as Lieutenant Mike Ferguson, found Jack Carlson, and walked off with him to have a talk.
On Tuesday night, Lieutenant Ferguson came to my house. “This is just routine,” he said when we were seated in the den. “We’re looking into this business involving Ms. Nina Dixon. At first, since a student’s cell phone was used to call her, we thought a student stole the phone and—well, played a prank. But it looks like the—well, prankster—might be someone who knew Ms. Dixon well, had access to her office and Mr. Carlson’s desk. So we gotta wonder if the prankster might be an English adjunct.”
Good lord, I thought. At my age, to be suspected of being a prankster— Couldn’t he find a more dignified euphemism? “Are you sure there was a prankster?” I asked.
“Well, no,” he admitted. “Ms. Dixon can’t show us the letters she says she found on Mr. Carlson’s desk, and Mr. Carlson says he never saw them. Did you see them?”
“No,” I said. “Jack said he got his money through an inheritance, not through investments. I assumed he was telling the truth.”
“He was,” Ferguson confirmed. “We checked his late second cousin’s will, plus his bank records. And no one can find this Web site Ms. Dixon says she visited. We know that last Tuesday she sent an e-mail to a Web address that no longer seems to exist, that a call was made from Ms. Travis’s cell phone to Ms. Dixon’s cell phone Thursday morning, and that Ms. Dixon withdrew twenty-five thousand from the Academic Excellence account that afternoon. That’s the only solid evidence we’ve got. So we’re not assuming there really was a prankster. But that is a lot of money, and the university’s eager to get it back. We gotta consider all possibilities. Can you tell me anything that might help?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t.”
He questioned me for half an hour, and I was impressed by how much he knew—about Nina, about the university, even about our gatherings at Monty’s and the fact that Danyelle waited on our table. A smart guy, I thought—and a nice guy, trying to make an uncomfortable situation less distressing for someone he probably regarded as probably innocent. He eased into chat about life as an adjunct, then leaned forward in his chair.
“Tell me this,” he said. “I know how hard you people work, how little you make. There must be other kinds of jobs you could get, and the job you’ve got now can’t be what you had in mind when you went to graduate school. So why are you still teaching?”
I thought it over for a moment. “Do you know the story about the elephant keeper at the circus, Lieutenant?”
“No,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve heard that one. How does it go?”
“Well,” I said, “this young man went to the circus and thought it was the most glamorous, exciting thing he’d ever seen. So he joined the circus, but the only job he could get was as the elephant keeper. For twenty years, all day, every day, he took his shovel and bucket and followed the elephants around, cleaning up after them. Then all the elephants developed, well, a chronic digestive disorder, and cleaning up after them became harder and messier than ever. Every night, the keeper came home exhausted, disgusted, and smelly. After many months, his wife said to him, ‘This job’s making you miserable. Why don’t you quit?’ And he looked at her in astonishment and said, ‘What? And leave show business?’”
Ferguson chuckled quietly. “Old dreams die hard, huh?”
“If at all,” I said. “When a class goes really well—when you feel that you’ve gotten through to the students, that you’ve helped them appreciate something important and beautiful and true—well, not many things in life compare. Even if classes don’t go that well very often, even if you seldom get the chance to teach things you find important and beautiful and true, it’s hard to stop hoping. It’s hard to walk away from the possibility that it can still happen, at least once in a while.”
“I can understand that,” he said. “I had high hopes, too, when I started out—protecting the innocent, bringing the guilty to justice. Sometimes it’s worked out that way. Most of the time it’s been a compromise.” He grinned. “At least I’ve had a few pretty good car chases along the way. And at least, when I quit, I’ll have a pension.”
Not much happened Wednesday. When I got to work, I found a note from Nina on my desk, saying the English adjuncts’ meeting would be in Beumler 203, not Cuthbert 107. So I went to Beumler at ten fifty, sat between Julian and Inez, and endured Jack’s political rant until Nina arrived. Maureen never showed up. When we returned to the office, we found her fuming. She’d waited in Cuthbert 107 until eleven thirty, she said. Why hadn’t someone told her the meeting was cancelled? When we told her that it had been moved, that Nina had left us all notes telling us about the change, she declared she’d received no note, called Nina a nasty name, and got back to grading essays.
Thursday passed quietly. We exchanged details about Ferguson’s visits to our homes. He’d shown Julian’s daughter a magic trick, read a book to Inez’s twins, and arrived at Maureen’s house just as she was putting spaghetti on to boil; he’d questioned her while enjoying a bowl of pasta carbonara. We heard rumors that President Swanson had called Nina to his office again, that she might be fired, that he might press charges.
On Friday, when Julian and I got back from our ten o’clock classes, we found Nina standing by Maureen’s desk, this time not bothering to disguise her interest in somebody else’s mail. “Lots of mail today,” she said, her tone brighter than it had been all week. “Maureen got a couple of thick envelopes from travel agencies. Is she planning a trip?”
Julian and I looked at each other. “She hasn’t mentioned it,” he said.
“Oh, she’s being mysterious, is she?” Nina said, and made her tone brighter still as Maureen and Inez walked in. “Hi, Maureen! Your mail’s here! Planning a trip?”
Maureen walked over, glanced at the envelopes, and dropped them into the wastebasket. “Ads,” she said. “Junk mail.”
Nina scooped the envelopes back out. “Ads from two travel agencies in one day? That’d be quite a coincidence. Maybe you won a prize. Open them and see.”
Sighing, Maureen ripped the envelopes open. “Must be some new advertising gimmick,” she said. “They both say they’re responding to my request for brochures about cruises, but I never made a request.” She dumped everything back in the trash.
“It’s like those automated calls from satellite TV companies,” Julian offered. “We get those all the time: ‘Great news! Your application for our special one-time offer has been approved!’ And of course we never made any application.”
That ended the discussion, but it made me uneasy. Later, after Maureen left to teach at the community college, I walked past her desk and noticed her wastebasket was empty. Had she decided to look through the brochures after all?
We got our answer when Maureen returned to put in one last office hour before going to Monty’s with us. Shortly after four, Lieutenant Ferguson walked into the office, accompanied by Nina, and headed for Maureen’s desk. He lowered his voice.
“Dr. Fahey,” he said, “some questions have come up. May I speak to you alone?”
Maureen gave him a puzzled look. “You can speak to me here. I’ve got an office hour—I should stay available to students. What is it?”
“It’s a delicate matter,” he said. “It’d be best if—”
“She’s behind this, isn’t she?” Maureen cut in, looking past him to glare at Nina. “She’s got some scheme going. Well, let’s clear it up here and now.”
He lowered his voice still further, but we could all hear. “If that’s how you want it,” he said. “Ms. Dixon called me this morning about the travel brochures. She says you claimed those were junk mail, but she called the travel agencies, and they said you called them Wednesday, saying you’d come into some money and were planning a cruise.”
“Nina’s lying,” Maureen said flatly. “She does that a lot.”
He grimaced. “I went to both agencies and checked their phone records. They both received calls from your home, placed between 11:05 and 11:15 Wednesday morning. Ms. Dixon says you missed a staff meeting at that time.”
For a moment, Maureen just looked stunned. Then her eyes filled with fury. “This is a setup, Lieutenant. I missed the meeting because Nina never told me it had been moved. She left notes on everyone else’s desk, but she didn’t—”
“I did!” Nina insisted, her voice too shrill. “I distinctly remember putting the note on your desk! And I saw you in the ladies’ room before you left for your ten o’clock class. I reminded you about the room change, and you said—”
“That’s another lie,” Maureen said. “We never spoke that morning.”
“We did!” Nina’s face purpled. “And that’s not all! Tell her about what Danyelle said yesterday, Lieutenant, about seeing her loitering in the coatroom at Monty’s on the day the cell phone disappeared, and about finding an earring stuck to her jacket—”
“That’s enough,” Ferguson said. “We shouldn’t go into that here. Dr. Fahey, Ms. Dixon also says she walked into this office yesterday and saw you looking at something in your bottom desk drawer. When you saw her, you slammed the drawer shut. She’s asked me to search the drawer. I don’t have a warrant yet, but—”
“Go ahead.” Maureen’s voice was utterly calm now, utterly cold. “But please notice the drawer has no lock. And Nina has a key to our office. She can get in here anytime she wants and plant any evidence she pleases. Be careful about fingerprints.”
By now, there wasn’t much point in pretending to be oblivious to what was going on. Julian, Inez, and I gathered to watch as Ferguson took things from Maureen’s bottom drawer: end-of-semester essays students hadn’t bothered to pick up, filled-up grade books, outdated employee manuals. Almost every teacher has a drawer where such stuff accumulates. One might go months without opening such a drawer.
At the back of the drawer, he found other things. There was a manila envelope filled with letterhead for Roth and Cox Investments, with just the firm name and a Web address. (“That’s the firm!” Nina shrieked.) There was a sheet of paper with three numbers typed on it. (“My God!” Nina cried. “That’s the combination to my gym lock!”) There was an envelope containing six fifty-dollar bills. (“Oh, Maureen!” Nina moaned. “How could you?”) And there was a single earring, a polished jade oval set in gold.
“My ex-husband gave me those earrings,” Maureen said. Her voice sounded drained, resigned. “I haven’t worn them in twelve years. Does Danyelle claim she found the matching earring stuck to her jacket? On the day her cell phone disappeared?”
“Wait,” Julian said. “That was two weeks ago at Monty’s, right? Well, I was with Maureen—so were Amy and Inez. And I’m sure she didn’t have those earrings on. I—”
“Thank you, Julian,” Maureen said. “But no one who takes one look at you would believe you’d notice what earrings a woman was wearing—certainly not a woman in her fifties. And it was two weeks ago.” She turned to Ferguson. “Should I get my coat? Are we going downtown, as they say?”
“That might be a good place to talk,” he said, almost apologetically. “Thank you, Dr. Fahey.” He cast a look over his shoulder at Nina. “You’re coming, too, Ms. Dixon.”
Minutes later, Julian, Inez, and I stood next to Maureen’s desk, alone. “It’s ludicrous,” Inez said. “Why would Maureen keep those things in her desk, where anyone could find them? Ferguson can’t be taking this seriously.”
“He’s clearly skeptical,” Julian said, “and clearly sympathetic to Maureen. But a cop can’t ignore evidence. And if those calls were made from her house—”
“Maureen keeps a key in a little metal box attached to her drainpipe,” I said. “She’s had it there ever since her kids were in high school and kept forgetting their keys. I know that; I bet lots of people know that. Why can’t Nina know that? Why couldn’t she have let herself into Maureen’s house and made the calls?”
“Because Nina was in the meeting, with us, when the calls were made,” Inez said. “That witch! She managed it so she has a foolproof alibi, while Maureen was all by herself in an empty classroom, with no alibi at all.”
“If she really was in that classroom,” Julian said slowly. “You don’t think—”
“Of course not,” I said. “If Maureen took the trouble of going home to make the calls, why have the brochures mailed to the office? It’s a frame. Nina’s scared—the police can’t find the money, and she can’t prove someone stole it from her. To protect herself, she’s got to get the university and the police to focus on another bad guy.”
“And she picked Maureen,” Inez said. “The logical choice. We’re all suspects, because we have access to Jack’s desk and Nina’s office. But Maureen has the strongest motive because she’s in the worst financial shape.”
“True,” I agreed. “And Maureen’s flagrantly bitter, and she has a long history of sparring with Nina and no spouse to stand up for her. She does have friends to stand up for her, though. So how do we prove the frame’s a fake?”
Julian hesitated. “Here’s the thing,” he said. “The frame’s a fake—no argument. But chances are someone did set Nina up and steal the money from her, and chances are it was one of us. And I’m sorry to say it, but chances are it was Maureen. All along, she was the most serious about our therapy sessions. To us, it was a joke, but she—”
“We all got wrapped up in it,” I said, alarmed at the direction his talk was taking.
“And we all helped plan the crime,” Inez said. “If one of us actually committed it, don’t we all share some responsibility? Besides, even if we don’t know who stole the money, we do know Nina planted that evidence. Is it right to let Maureen be framed by false evidence, even if it’s for a crime she really did commit?”
“Whoa,” Julian said. “That’s a tough one. I gotta go back to my undergraduate school, ask my ethics professor what he thinks. And what if we can’t help Maureen without planting more false evidence? That’s not right—and it’s risky.”
“Criminals have to take risks,” I said. “Maureen said that; remember?”
“We’re not criminals,” he countered. “And if Maureen didn’t make those calls from her house, who did?”
“Nina’s accomplice,” I said promptly. “Maureen said only stupid criminals take accomplices. That sounds like Nina. And I bet I know who her accomplice is.”
“Danyelle Travis,” Inez said eagerly. “Of course. She lets herself into Maureen’s house Wednesday, makes the calls, and takes the earrings. Then she tells the police she’s just remembered seeing Maureen loitering in the coatroom at Monty’s, and just found an earring stuck to her jacket. She didn’t tell them that until yesterday—Nina herself said so. Why wait till then unless she had to steal the earrings first?”
“And meanwhile Nina plants the other earring in Maureen’s desk,” Julian said slowly, “along with the other stuff. But why would Danyelle help Nina frame Maureen?”
“Danyelle’s probably as scared as Nina is,” I said. “The only real evidence the police have is that someone called Nina from Danyelle’s phone. Danyelle could have lied about the phone being lost; she could have set up the whole scam, called Nina with her own phone, and stolen the money. I’m sure the police suggested that possibility to Danyelle—that’s probably why she started crying while being questioned.”
“Danyelle really could have done all that,” Inez said. “If she overheard us at Monty’s, that could’ve given her the idea. Do you think she might possibly—”
“Not possibly,” I said. “Danyelle’s too clueless to pull all that off. But the police probably don’t know how clueless she is; they haven’t read her essays. They’re probably treating her like a suspect, and she’s probably terrified. If Nina came to her with a plan for getting somebody else arrested, she’d jump at it.”
“Maybe,” Julian said. “But that doesn’t help us clear Maureen.”
“It might,” I said. “Remember the other things Maureen said about accomplices—they make mistakes, they panic, and in the end they make a deal with the police and turn state’s evidence. I can see Danyelle doing that. She’s the weakest link in a flimsy frame.”
“I’m not sure of the metaphor,” Inez said, hesitantly. “Do frames have links?”
“I don’t care,” I said. “The point is, we just have to give Danyelle a push, make her turn against Nina. How hard can that be?”
“Probably not that hard,” Julian said, and we sat down to talk it over.
We half-expected that Danyelle wouldn’t be at Monty’s, that Ferguson had asked her, too, to come downtown, but she was there, ignoring customers and spilling beer as usual. When she saw the three of us walk in without Maureen, I swear she smirked.
“Hey, you guys,” she said. “I’ll get your pitcher—and three mugs.”
“No pitcher today,” Julian said jauntily. “Today, we’re celebrating. Bring us a bottle of your finest champagne.”
Danyelle blinked twice. “That’d be André,” she said.
“Fine.” I tried not to sound relieved. What would we have done if she’d said Dom Pérignon? “And four glasses—Dr. Fahey’s joining us soon. Goodness! That was close!”
“It certainly was,” Inez said. “I thought he might actually arrest her. I’m so glad that she insisted he send cops to question her neighbors, and that one neighbor happened to see someone leaving her house Wednesday morning.”
“Yeah, that was lucky,” Julian said. “And when that secretary confirmed she’d talked to her in the ladies’ room around eleven fifteen—wait a minute.” He turned to Danyelle, who still stood behind his chair, eyes less vacant than usual. “Our champagne?”
“What?” Danyelle gave her head a quick shake. “Oh yeah. I’ll get it.”
I flipped my cell phone open. When Danyelle returned with the champagne, I was chatting busily. “That’s great, Maureen,” I said. “It’s sad she’s hysterical, but she deserves—yes, we’ll wait for you. What? Sure, bring him along. He should be part of the celebration. If he’d fallen for her lies—but he’s too smart for that. How long do you think you’ll be? Really? She’s that close to breaking? Fantastic.” I flipped the phone shut.
Danyelle was struggling with the cork; Julian made no move to help her. “So everything’s going well?” he said.
“Very well. Lieutenant, well...” I made a pretense of lowering my voice. “He decided they should all go to, well, to our friend’s house. A sketch artist came along to work with the neighbor, and now they’ve got a good sketch of the person seen leaving her house. And a lab team went through the house and found more evidence.”
“Fingerprints?” Inez said eagerly. “Hair? Fibers?”
“She couldn’t say,” I said. “She was calling from a police car, and Nin—well, She-Whose-Name-We’d-Rather-Avoid was there too. She says the frame wasn’t her idea: the person who really stole the money forced her into it. She was afraid to say no, because this person gets violent.”
“Violent?” Inez said, gasping. “How terrifying! I hope Lieutenant—I hope he arrests this other person right away.”
“And he’ll throw away the key,” I said solemnly. “Those were his exact words, our friend said. He just has to get, well, our colleague to break down and name this other person. And apparently she’s within seconds of doing exactly that.”
The cork shot out of the bottle, sending a spray of champagne high into the air, ricocheting off the ceiling, and landing in a full mug of beer two tables away. Danyelle slumped off to get a cloth to clean up the mess. “And a fifth glass!” Inez called after her.
By the time Danyelle got back, we were hunched over the table, conferring in conspiratorial tones. “They really don’t have much evidence against her,” Inez said. “She admits planting things in our friend’s desk, but she’s got an alibi for the time the phone calls were made—”
“Unlike this other person,” Julian said. “And he or she was seen leaving our friend’s house and must’ve stolen the earrings. So he or she is definitely a thief. It follows that the thief who stole the earrings is the thief who stole the money.”
“That’s logical,” I agreed. “And I got the impression the other earring has already turned up somewhere. He wouldn’t say, but— Over here, Danyelle. You missed a drop.”
“Anyway,” Inez said, “this other person’s the one in real trouble. Our colleague helped with the frame, but she was forced into it. She may talk her way out of jail time.”
“Especially if she’s cooperating with the police now,” Julian said. “That gives her a huge advantage. She can tell the story her way, say the other person masterminded the plot to steal the money from the university, the break-in at our friend’s house, the frame, everything. The police are bound to believe the one cooperating with them; they’ll pin all the charges on this other— Oh, Danyelle, don’t go away. May we see an appetizer menu?”
“Right away,” Danyelle said; but she was already practically running from the table, already taking off her apron. Moments later, we saw her emerge from the coatroom and leave the restaurant. We looked at each other grimly.
“She’s not necessarily heading for the police station to implicate Nina,” Inez said. “She could be running home to her parents.”
“I doubt it,” I said. “She’s probably afraid Ferguson would drag her back in handcuffs. And she’s used to living in a protected world where any student who makes an accusation against a staff member is automatically believed, no matter how ridiculous the accusation is. She probably thinks the police are as gullible as college administrators.”
“And this time,” Julian said, “the police wouldn’t have to be all that gullible. Danyelle will probably tell them the truth—more or less.”
“The truth, more or less.” Inez smiled slightly. “That’s probably as much as any of us will ever know about all this.”
Julian smiled, too, also slightly. “Actually, one of us probably knows the whole truth. But I’m half-hoping she—or he—never has to reveal it.” He lifted his glass. “Here’s to Maureen—and to one successful foray into a life of crime.”
* * * *
One week later, we were back at Monty’s, all four of us, at our usual table, with our usual pitcher of Bud Lite. We had a new waitress, a fortyish woman who made eye contact and didn’t spill beer. Maureen looked wonderful. She’d had her hair done and was wearing a new rose-colored wool dress that subtly accented a figure that, after two children and five decades, was gently rounded but still reasonably trim.
“So I met with President Swanson,” she said. “He’s given me back my old job of coordinating the writing center tutors. I won’t make nearly as much as Nina did—just one thousand a semester—but I’m glad to have it. And Swanson said he’s glad to have someone to step in at short notice, after Nina resigned for personal reasons.”
“He shouldn’t have let her resign for personal reasons,” Julian said grumpily. “He should’ve fired her outright. And he should’ve pressed charges.”
“There’s no absolute proof she has the money,” Inez said. “There’s just as much evidence pointing to Danyelle.”
“But Nina definitely withdrew a large sum from a university account for her own use,” Julian argued. “And both she and Danyelle planted false evidence and interfered with a police investigation—they both admitted to it. So why wasn’t either of them charged with anything? Why was Danyelle allowed to withdraw from all her classes with a full refund, long after the withdrawal deadline?”
“Because trials create scandal,” I said. “And colleges and universities hate scandal. Anyway, Maureen, I’m glad you got the writing center job back.”
She smiled at me. “According to two highly placed secretaries, the dean made a recommendation to the president. Thank you, Amy.”
I shrugged. “You’re the most qualified person for the job. The dean didn’t need my help to see that.”
“I feel a little bad about Nina, though,” Inez said. “True, she wasn’t qualified for her job, and she pushed aside more qualified people to get it. Even so—and without getting into things we don’t want to discuss—she probably didn’t steal the money. At least, she probably doesn’t still have it. So is it right that she’s out of work?”
“Did anyone force her to withdraw money she had no right to withdraw,” Maureen demanded, “or plant false evidence? Nina’s own vices led her to do all those things. No matter who has the money now, Nina’s responsible for what happened to her. Don’t waste pity on her, Inez. Don’t pity Danyelle, either. She hasn’t suffered much, and she needn’t have suffered at all if she’d refused to help with the frame. And she’s young—maybe she’ll learn from all this.”
I shook my head. “Not much chance of Danyelle ever learning anything under any circumstances, Maureen. You know that. You’ve had her in class.”
“Well, I’ve got news,” Julian said. “My wife and I talked it over, and I’m starting law school next fall. Just part-time—I’ll still need to do some teaching, pay some bills. But in the long term, being a lawyer makes more financial sense than teaching does.”
Maureen looked stricken. “But are you interested in law?”
He nodded slowly. “I’m developing an interest. As of one month ago, I have started to develop a definite interest.”
Inez set her mug down. “I may make a change too. There was an ad in the paper for the new chain bookstore opening in town. I interviewed, and I was offered a job: Twenty hours a week, making more than I do now. And no essays to grade. I’d have more evening and weekend time for my family. Plus the company has a program to help part-time employees make the transition to management when they’re ready. The program’s specifically designed for employees with young children, the interviewer said. Ironic, isn’t it? This big, bad corporation found a way to help parents move into full-time jobs—something our oh-so-liberal universities can’t seem to figure out.”
“But you will finish your dissertation, won’t you?” Maureen asked.
“Definitely,” Inez said. “I enjoy research, and I love literature. I’ll have far more time to read if I stop teaching. And whether or not I ever use my degree, I damn well want the option of having ‘PhD’ engraved on my tombstone.”
“Well, this seems to be the time for revelations,” I said. “Craig and I had a talk too. I’m not going to teach in the fall—I’m taking the semester off to finish my article, maybe start that book. With luck, the article and the book will be so good that next time Phil Hanson teaches an Austen seminar, he’ll have to put them both in his bibliography. And we figure that if I spend more time clipping coupons, I can save almost as much at the grocery store as I can make teaching three sections of composition. Without essays hanging over my head all the time, I’m bound to be in a better mood.”
“Good grief!” Maureen said. “Did this last month traumatize all of you that much? Will I be the only one left? Is this the end of Adjuncts Anonymous?”
“We can still meet here on Fridays,” Julian said, “no matter what we’re doing during the rest of the week. Let’s order another pitcher and seal the deal.”
Maureen hesitated. “Actually, I have to go. Mike—Lieutenant Ferguson—and I got to know each other better last Friday while I was at the station. We’re going out to dinner tonight. I’d better get home—he’s picking me up in half an hour.”
So that explained the nicely done hair, the new dress. Have a good time tonight, Maureen, I wished fervently. Say yes to a second date, and a third. Fall in love with him. Marry him. You’re lonely, and he’s a smart, decent guy. And he has a pension.
“I should go too,” Inez said, standing up, and Julian and I stood, and we all looked at each other awkwardly. Then Maureen gave me an impulsive hug, and I hugged Inez, and then everyone was hugging everyone. It brought to mind the mock-solemn handshakes of a month ago. But this was a happier time, a better time.
I didn’t have carpooling duty, so I could go directly home. I pulled into the garage, lugged my essay-stuffed briefcase out of the backseat for weekend grading, and couldn’t resist the urge to lift the lid on our ancient freezer, to push aside the bags of peas and corn and pearl onions, to rummage beneath the loaves of bread bought on special, and to pull out the foil-wrapped package labeled “Aunt Susan’s Fruitcake, December, 2006.” I pulled back three layers of foil. Yes, there it was—twenty-five thousand dollars in crisp, cold bills.
As always, Maureen had been a good mentor. Criminals must take risks, she had said; but only stupid criminals take accomplices. So I’d taken the risk that someone would spot me when I put the letters on Jack’s desk and took them away again, when I tacked the note on Nina’s door, when I took her combination lock from her gym bag and put my own lock in its place, when I hurried across campus to the old gym wearing the jeans-and-bulky-jacket outfit most of our students wear most of the time, when I took the cash and the note from her gym bag and switched locks again, when I walked quickly back to my car, twenty-five thousand dollars stuffed in my jacket. But I’d taken no accomplices, not even my fellow adjuncts, not even my husband. It was my crime, mine alone.
If it hadn’t been for that damned Austen seminar, I probably wouldn’t have gotten mad enough to do it. But now that it was done, I felt fine. I had no regrets about Nina and Danyelle, no regrets about the university—after exploiting me for sweatshop wages for all these years, it owed me a lot more than twenty-five thousand. Maureen had a few uncomfortable hours—I’d never intended that—but she’d been tough enough to weather them, and now she was a little better off than she had been. With luck, she’d soon be a lot better off.
As for me, I had every intention of clipping coupons diligently, of trying to make ends meet on Craig’s salary alone. But if we came up short some weeks, I had backup. It never hurts to have a stack of cash in the freezer, just in case.